The present invention relates to a method and a system for working a blade material for a mold using a numerical control (NC) machine tool.
The working of blade materials for molds has conventionally been carried out by certain manual operations. Specifically, the operator selects a material by referring to a drawing of a product to be worked and determines an appropriate setup and then an operator who is usually the same person subsequently performs rough working by operating a machine tool, finally finishing the workpiece to required product dimensions while measuring the relevant machining allowances.
In such conventional manual operations, one operator performs both the setup operation and the subsequent machine operations. Hence, it has been impossible to concurrently perform setup operations and machining. This not only causes the productivity of the overall system to suffer but also imposes a heavy burden on the operator. Furthermore, since the operator carries out the working of the workpiece to meet certain product dimensions by manually measuring the dimensions of the workpiece, there is a significant possibility of producing a product with dimensional errors due to erroneous measurements being made.
In addition, since a large variety of blade products with different dimensions are manufactured, the dimensions of the basic materials used as the blade materials for molds also vary. Accordingly, it is not suitable to work blade materials for molds by using an NC machine tool which must be operated after preparing an NC program in advance. Namely, since the steps of determining an appropriate setup for the working of blade materials for molds and of selecting the basic materials must be carried out by trained staff, there has been a problem in implementing this working process on a fully automatic basis by making use of an NC machine tool.